While in the western world we pay more attention to Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest remains one of Japan’s most important video gaming exports. The truth is, we probably wouldn’t have many of today’s modern Japanese-made RPG tropes without Dragon Quest; it is the game that defined the parameters of the genre as we know it today.
That makes Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake a particularly important title. Arguably, the first three Dragon Quests are a trio of the most important games of their kind; of that three, the third entry is actually the narrative first entry, a prequel to its forebears. This is the ideal Dragon Quest entry point – and any remake serves a purpose not just as a fun video game, but as a wonderful slice of history the better part of forty years in the making.
It’s difficult to get a read on exactly how good the full version of something like an RPG will be based on a demo less than an hour in length, of course. But from what I’ve seen so far, Dragon Quest 3’s HD mulligan appears to be the pitch-perfect offering for that stated mission. It wants to retain everything that makes the original great, but modernized. It wants to provide a new-but-retro entry point to the Dragon Quest series. It seems like it’ll do that.